Title

Aureli Augustini: The praenomen is thinly attested. Neither A. nor any of his correspondents or polemical opponents use it, and it has been thought to be a misreading of something in Orosius (A. M. LaBonnardière, Rev. Bén. 91[1981], 231-237, citing Oros. liber apologeticus 1.4); but its frequent occurrence in early manuscript colophons (cf. M. M. Gorman, JThS 35 [1984], 475-480) cannot be explained as a vulgar error. See also Mandouze 71-74 on A.'s name and attempts (mainly drawing on the names of Monnica and Adeodatus) to give A. a non-Roman genealogical and cultural background (e.g.,W. H. C. Frend, JThS 43[1942], 188-191, reprised in his The Donatist Church [Oxford, 1952], 230). More objective is C. Lepelley, Atti-1986 1.104, showing the extreme rarity in Africa of the names Augustinus (3 others attested in Mandouze, Pros. chr. and CIL 8), Patricius (2 others), and Monnica (1 other), with a certain (perhaps remote) aristocratic pretension in the names of father and son. Whatever the facts, and whatever `African' character in the luxuriance of A.'s style, this text is thoroughly Latin, Roman, and Christian.

A. never mentions his own name in conf., and does so rarely elsewhere, usually self-consciously (en. Ps. 36. s. 3.20, saying how he would have his congregation defend him against critics: `Augustinus episcopus est in ecclesia catholica, sarcinam suam portat, rationem redditurus est deo'; c. Sec. 1, `senti de Augustino quidquid libet, sola me in oculis dei conscientia non accuset').

confessionum: It is perhaps a rhetorical gesture when A. says at en. Ps. 30. en. 1.11, `vita mea est confiteri te,' but it is also a warning that `confession' runs beyond the pages of this text and a suggestion that the relationship of this text to A.'s life is not that of signifier to signified.

By presenting his words as a `confession', A. claims not to claim authority for his own text (and by so doing does exactly what he claims not to do), but refers those who question his authority for speaking to a higher authority. He turns away skeptics by telling them (at 10.3.3) that his text is for those who are joined to him in caritas (again invoking the higher authority), and that it is not surprising if others refuse to believe what they read in it. This strategy aims to freeze out the hostile or skeptical reader. A. admits that the text has no authority with such a reader, but implies that this failure is the fault of the reader, not of the writer. His business is with his God, for the edification of those who are chosen by his God to benefit from the text; other readers are left to shift for themselves.

A.'s comments on his own work are few and all date from the last years of his life, when he often found himself going back over old ground, especially in his quarrel with Julian of Eclanum.

The 13th chapter of Tobias (a book not often quoted by A., but accepted as canonical at doctr. chr. 2.8.13, and cf. 10.34.52, `o lux quam videbat Tobis'), the canticle of Tobias, resembles conf. both for content and structure (Vg. text).1 Italics here indicate the most notable parallels to conf.:

1.1.1

There have been various attempts to find precedents for this form of opening, 2 but in the history of Latin literature, its originality and oddity are clear. Most Latin prose works begin with a dedicatory epistle or a formal proem: this work has neither. 3 It begins abruptly, with speech directed to a silent God - but speech chosen from the words of that God himself. The first sentence is followed by a reflective pause for inquiry, which should not blur the main purpose: invocation, an opening more appropriate to poetry than prose. The work is not verse, but it is not conventional prose either: study of its rhythms has shown that the pattern of the work's sentence endings is neither quantitative nor accentual, and sui generis in A.'s own works (see prolegomena, n. 126). A. invented a form and style unique in his own oeuvre and in the traditions he inherited. In retrospect we can see him working towards this style through earlier, far more conventional works (e.g. sol., where the dialogue form prevails, and the prayer of invocation is carefully set off within the dialogue at sol. 1.1.2-6, but conf. represents a breakthrough for A.

This opening can give rise to the disconcerting feeling of coming into a room and chancing upon a man speaking to someone who isn't there. He gestures in our direction and mentions us from time to time, but he never addresses his readers. As literary text, conf. resembles a one-sided, non-fiction epistolary novel, enacted in the presence of the silence (and darkness) of God. 4 What A. attempts is a radical turn away from common sense - seen as tragically flawed by mad self-love - towards the wholly other, and thus towards the true self - for to him, we are not who we think we are (see on 10.8.15). 5

magnus es, domine: The work begins with confessio laudis. 6 Strictly speaking, these two lines contain a complete confession (see en. Ps. 143.12 [quoted on 8.2.4], which shows the proud of this world giving way and confessing thus: `dicturi sunt: tu magnus, domine') that renders the remaining 78,000 or so words of the text superfluous. This exclamation is self-sufficient; nothing more need be said, ever. But the fall from eternity into time brought with it the fall from timeless immutability of discourse into a restless and open-ended search for God in the inspired texts. Cf. en. Ps. 145. 6, `quando implet laudator excellentiam laudati?' Hence he adds another line of Psalm-text, a link to what will follow.

domine: A. speaks to God alone. At 11.1.1, after canvassing his own past (Bks. 1- 9) and present (Bk. 10), he expects his readers to be able to join him in the present: `sed affectum meum excito in te et eorum qui haec legunt, ut dicamus omnes: magnus dominus et laudabilis valde' (see notes there). The second person direct address to God pervades conf., occurring in 381 of the work's 453 paragraphs (measured by the presence of vocatives, second person singular pronouns, and verb forms: but the second person verb form does not seem to occur addressed to God without either a vocative or a pronoun to specify the reference). Paragraphs without such address include some notably desolate and God-less passages (e.g., 6.15.25, on the banishment of his mistress), but not all are of that sort; see in particular on 10.6.9 for the longest stretch without such address. On the forms of address to God in conf., see Knauer 31-74 and J. Morán, Aug. Stud. 4(1973), 141-157, with a catalogue of 165 passages at 152-157.

For comparison, in sample works of Cicero, et appears with the following relative frequencies: Brutus 3.6%, de amicitia 2.4%, pro Caelio 1.8%; from A., in civ., approx. 3.3%, in en. Ps. approx. 4.5%, and in trin. approx. 5.2%; in conf. 5.8% (4585 out of 78,858 words).

laudare . . . vult: not laudat, for the praise in the first two lines is imperfect, the expression in words more wish than deed (cf. 2.1.1, `recordari volo'). A. seeks to praise. In the implicit question whether he succeeds is encompassed the tension of the whole text. At the moment of giving praise, his words fall back into self-reflection and doubt. His mortality might well seem a good reason for not praising the creator who made him mortal: but already in that objection, the explanation begins to obtrude.

homo: A. means not homo quidam, but speaks directly of himself, his own act of attempted praise in the first lines. An exact parallel at 1.7.11, `exaudi, deus: vae peccatis hominum! et homo dicit haec, et misereris eius, quoniam tu fecisti eum [cf. here `fecisti nos ad te'] et peccatum non fecisti in eo.' In both cases the author's voice is heard in spontaneous exclamation, followed immediately by a less spontaneous, more detached reflection on what that first exclamation means in view of the creature/creator relation of humankind to God. Cf. also 7.1.1, `homo et talis homo'. (To be sure, the form of expression emphasizes A.'s representativeness, hence inviting readers to share in the inquiry and praise that follow; a similar representativeness underlies the whole of Bks. 11-13.)

laudare te delectet: Brown 155, `Augustine came to view delight as the mainspring of human action,' citing div. qu. Simp. 1.2.21; cf. also doctr. chr. 1.33.37, `vicinissime dicitur frui cum delectatione uti.' In phrasing the matter that way, Brown approaches the position of Cornelius Jansen, who distinguished delectatio from voluntas, and made the former a determining force on the latter; for an orthodox critique of that view (taking what is indeed the more defensible position that for A. `delight' and `will' are two names for the same thing), see E. Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine (New York, 1960), 321n81-323n84.

The role of delectatio is strongly foreshadowed in the rhetorical tradition. Cf. Cic. or. 21.69, `erit igitur eloquens . . . qui in foro causisque civilibus ita dicet, ut probet, ut delectet, ut flectat' (quoted with slight modifications at doctr. chr. 4.12.27), with parallels at Brut. 49.185, de or. 2.28.121, opt. gen. or. 1.3. Between probare (the establishment of a fact) and flectere (stirring the audience to act), delectare is the crucial moment of motivation. See on 1.6.7.

donec: Pizzolato, Lectio I-II 13, `Donec pare il termine-chiave dell' espressione.' The temporal dimension of disquiet is both an important manifestation of the problem itself (as Bk. 11 will make clear) and at the same time a suggestion here of hope.

The former view is to be preferred. It imparts to the text a tension between present and future that is at home on this page: scire (= credere) would apply to the inquiry in the present paragraph, while intellegere would anticipate the fuller comprehension to be worked out through the remainder of conf. and through the rest of A.'s life. Against that, the hendiadys is flat and far from obvious; such redundancy of expression is out of place with the concise and carefully chosen style of this opening page.

The questions posed here by A. (from `da mihi, domine' to `ut sciaris') are met by a sequence of authoritative scriptural dicta, collected from three different sources, in part themselves questions--but only rhetorical questions (on that device see below on 1.3.3). These citations together provide the data required to answer the questions that precede. (The phrase `invenientes laudabunt eum' does not come with clear scriptural warrant: it appears as a conclusion drawn by A. himself.)

The scriptural data may be schematized thus:

credere (= scire?) --> invocare

praedicare --> credere

requirere (= quaerere) --> laudare

quaerere --> invenire.

These reduce without difficulty to:

praedicare --> credere --> invocare

requirere/quaerere --> invenire/laudare.

The inquiry arose from a moment of unfulfilled intention (`et laudare te vult homo') that is now situated in its context. Such a quest leads to discovery and praise, but arises from invocation, which arises from belief, which in turn finally arises from the antecedent act of preaching (the only act in the sequence performed by someone other than the speaker). Invocation, therefore, is the possible and necessary place to begin for a search that will end, for purposes of this book, at 13.38.53, and that will end for A., in the fullness of divine requies. But invocation itself (as the next paragraph will develop) is problematical.

1.2.2

Invocation is postponed by consideration of the problems it raises. Every half-assertion to be inferred from a rhetorical question seems cancelled by later questions. This paragraph and the next pursue the inquiry preliminary to the attempt at invocation itself beginning in 1.4.4. The organization of the pattern is similar to a series of concentric circles: homo within caelum et terra within quidquid est. The paradox is that of calling down into a man a God who is already there. This concern with the `place' of God, is tied up with A.'s pre-conversion notion of God permeating all matter (see on 7.1.2 and cf. 7.5.7, `spongiam quamlibet magnam'). See also 13.1.1 for renewed invocation (and confirmation that the speaker's invocation is preceded by divine speech). Of many parallel passages (see others below), n.b. en. Ps. 74.2, `noli antequam confitearis invocare; confitere, et invoca' (reading Ps. 74.2, `confitebimur tibi, deus, confitebimur tibi, et invocabimus nomen tuum').

qui fecit caelum et terram: Gn. 1.1, `in principio fecit deus caelum et terram.' (The fecit is characteristic of the version in which Augustine quotes Genesis: for text, see on 13.1.1.) Because Bks. 11-13 comment at length on the first chapter of Genesis, this verse offers the most frequently repeated verbal pattern in conf.

caelum et terram: See on 12.2.2ff for full discussion (and cf. also Gn. litt. 1). The phrase may mean either the visible heaven and earth as representative of all of visible creation, or it may be taken to represent both invisible and visible creation--on that reading, terra represents all that is material and visible, while caelum becomes the caelum caeli (12.2.2). A.'s interpretation ensures that the phrase remains all-embracing, even for readers who do not share the cosmology of the author of Genesis.

As in 1.1.1, the method is to proceed by questioning (quaerere); adducing scriptural authority, this is the first declarative sentence in the paragraph. The second declarative sentence that follows makes explicit the conclusion authorized by scripture. He then (`an potius . . . omnia') revises the conclusion just reached through further inquiry culminating in renewed citation of scriptural authority. The revision is affirmed in the elliptical sentence to follow (`etiam sic . . .').

ex quo omnia: Not an echo only of Rom. 11.36, `quoniam ex ipso et per ipsum et in ipso sunt omnia: ipsi gloria in saecula saeculorum. amen.'du Roy 479-485 shows that this is a liturgical doxology based on the Romans verse but fused with 1 Cor. 8.6 (`ex quo omnia . . . per quem omnia'). Both the `doxology' and a more accurate `citation' of the Romans verse occur at all periods of A.'s career, but the `doxology' form appears as early as quant. an. 34.77 and mor. 1.14.24, hence (on du Roy's argument) attests a liturgical influence at an early period that scholars have tended to see as intellectualist and Platonic rather than churchly. (Only here so fully in conf.; echoes with a light touch at 1.6.10, 4.12.18, 4.15.24, 7.20.26, 12.7.7, 12.19.28 [some so indirect as to be unable to tell whether they reflect the `doxology' or the `citation'; where it is possible to judge, these echoes favor the `doxology', but they are not on du Roy's list]).

1.3.3

Argument by rhetorical question: There are almost 700 question marks in the text of conf.: many are explicitly `rhetorical' (`put not to elicit information, but as a more striking substitute for a statement of contrary effect': Fowler, Modern English Usage), and most of the rest are like those in the last two sentences here, open-ended when asked, but swiftly resolved by A. This is a high frequency of interrogation, but ancient practice was more abundant in this regard than modern: in 31 OCT pages of Cic. har. resp., e.g., there are 38 question marks (about half the conf. rate), while in a comparable piece of modern expository prose, there are only 15 (less than a quarter the conf. rate). Where it is difficult to speak of God (cf. the end of 1.4.4), the rhetorical question has the effect of sharing the burden of direct assertion with the audience; and where quaerere is a theme, the audience can share that as well.

ergone: Enclitic interrogative -ne occurs 33 times in conf., 17 in the form of nonne (then always in first position in phrase or clause); in every case save this one, the word to which -ne is attached stands first in the caesum or membrum (twice the word is ergone: 4.14.22, 10.37.61).

(1) Though it may seem self-evident that A. found such notions in his neo-Platonic sources, then sought out the scriptural warrants that would support them, the process is likely to have been more complicated. What he found in the neo-Platonists that appealed to him had some correspondence to what he knew and thought before ever he read the platonicorum libri, for he did not come to those texts in any specially naive or untaught way. What he selected of the neo-Platonists to retain by the time of writing conf. was further influenced by what of their doctrine he thought compatible with (better: thought to be a reflection of) Christian doctrine. Moderns find his mature doctrine (that Christian teaching is the antecedent and lucid whole, neo-Platonism the derivative and imperfect reflection) to be the reverse of what we expect, and we now portray an A. who manufactured Christian doctrines from neo-Platonic cloth: the argument may perhaps be sustained, but we should never forget that to A. it seemed otherwise.

(2) Here, moreover, a doctrine of dispersion of divine being into material fragments, and the hope of restoration of wholeness, was central to the Manichees: ep. 236.2, `animas non solum hominum sed etiam pecorum de dei esse substantia et omnino partes dei esse arbitrantur. deum denique bonum et verum dicunt cum tenebrarum gente pugnasse et partem suam tenebrarum principibus miscuisse eamque toto mundo inquinatam et ligatam per cibos electorum suorum et per solem ac lunam purgari asseverant et, quod purgari de ipsa dei parte non potuerit, in fine saeculi aeterno ac poenali vinculo conligari'. The coincidence points to a late antique habit of thought that perceived the world-as-experienced as a place of shards and fragments, and supplemented that perception with a yearning for wholeness. A. knew Manichean, Platonic, and Christian forms of that perception and that yearning and chose to use Christian ones here, without having to abjure echoes of other forms.

1.4.4

Invocation at last: A. calling on his God to give power to his speech. Once again inquiry finds its answer in a scriptural text--again a rhetorical question.

The paragraph is a tissue of paradoxes, with a submerged polemical purpose. The commonest antitheses are between the apparent mutability and this-worldly action of God and the immutability and otherwordliness that orthodoxy proclaims. One effect of asserting those pairs of opposites is to rule out Manichean criticism of the God of the Old Testament. For the criticism as A. saw it, cf. mor. 1.10.16, `desinite errare, non colimus paenitentem deum, non invidum, non indigum, non crudelem, non quaerentem de hominum vel pecorum sanguine voluptatem, non cui flagitia et scelera placeant, non possessionem suam terrae quadam particula terminantem. in has enim atque huiusmodi nugas graviter copioseque invehi soletis.'

For the form of the paragraph, cf. Amb. de fide 1.16.106 (quoted above on 1.3.3, `ubique totus'). Detailed discussion of this paragraph by W. Simon, Wissenschaft und Weisheit 45(1982), 130-157; he collects many more biblical parallels for the expressions here, confining himself less strictly to specific verbal echoes.

omnipotentissime: Language here is pressed beyond its own extremes; omnipotens strictly should have no comparative or superlative, but it is used, e.g. by A. at civ. 21.9, `per miraculum omnipotentissimi creatoris', and by Macrob., somn. Scip. 1.17.12, `deus ille omnipotentissimus'.

Though the comparative and superlative of misericors are not unexampled elsewhere, A. is noticeably fond of the superlative particularly. TLL 8.1128 reports the comparative once each in Plautus and Cicero as well as ps.-Quintilian and 3x in civ.; the superlative is only attested from A. `saepe' (56x; in conf. at 6.5.7, 6.8.13, 9.2.4), ps.-Amb. s. 17.2, and Leo Magnus s. 2.2.

G-M: `A's rhetorical ingenuity finds play in the series of antitheses which follow.' The matter is more serious than that. Here it is the elusiveness--the incomprehensibility--of God that reduces A. to the rhetoric of paradox (see en. Ps. 146.11, quoted on 1.1.1, `magna virtus tua').

quoniam loquaces muti sunt: `For though they say much [about other things] they are mute [in all that matters]'; 10BA: `Et malheur à ceux qui se taisent sur toi puisque, bavards, ils sont muets.'. The oxymoron (mutus offers the natural antonym for loquax at civ. 4.19, `Fortuna loquax et muta Felicitas') has puzzled. The preceding sentence (`et quid diximus . . . cum de te dicit') treats those who, like A., do speak of God; this sentence refers to those who say nothing at all of God--or better, who utter many words but succeed in saying nothing that genuinely speaks of the God who is. The phrase recurs at 7.2.3, `sat erat mihi . . . adversus . . . loquaces mutos [sc. manichaeos] . . . illud quod . . . proponi solebat'. Its use there does not suggest that the persons referred to in the present passage are well-intentioned. The Manichees are models of curiositas (see on 3.6.10); at 7.6.8, there is a parallel case of curiosi (astrologers) who rattle on, their language out of control, so much so that they even foretell the future correctly by pure chance sometimes, and cf. civ. 18.24, `philosophorum subtilis et acuta loquacitas'; en. Ps. 144.7, `eloquentes muti, laudantes creaturam, obliviscentes creatorem'. Cf. 5.7.12, where `loquaces . . . dicentes nihil,' also refers to the Manichees; cf. also 8.10.22, `vaniloqui et mentis seductores' --of Manichees (sim. association at civ. 5.26, `quid est loquacius vanitate?': vanitas linked with loquacitas at least 17x in A.'s works); they are the frequent, but not exclusive, targets of the same reproach often elsewhere (e.g., Gn. c. man. 1.16.26-17.27, 2.25.38 [`nulli enim loquacius']; of himself as a Manichee at persev. 2.55, `quam [fidem catholicam] miserrima et furiosissima loquacitate vastabam').

An alternate interpretation is not uncommon: Pusey: `Yet woe to him that speaketh not, since mute are even the most eloquent.' J. M. Campbell and M. R. P. McGuire, The Confessions of Saint Augustine (New York, 1931, ad loc.: `even the most eloquent in his praise are as if mute'. Others equivocate (e.g., G-M: `since those who say most are no better than dumb'). W. Simon, Wissenschaft und Weisheit 45(1982), 156-157, turns the expression on its head by seeing in `loquaces muti sunt' allusion to Gospel passages where the mute are made to speak (Pellegrino/Carena suggest the same link), but he does not discuss the force of loquax in A.

If loquacitas is most at this period a fault charged to the Manichees, it becomes for A. the pre-eminent flaw of Julian's character: from the first paragraph of c. Iul. imp., the accusation occurs no fewer than 78 times in that work. Thus faults of speech were at all times ones that A. felt strongly about, and feared to fall into (n.b. also late in life, retr. pr. 2 quoting Prov. 10.19, `ex multiloquio non effugies peccatum' as a caution prior to reviewing his own abundant literary output).11

miserere ut loquar: cont. 1.1, `nam qui eam [continentiam] donat continentibus fidelibus suis, ipse dat sermonem de illa loquentibus ministris suis.'s. Caill. 2.5.1, `inde loquamur quod ipse donabit.' (See on 6.3.3 for other expressions of the way a bishop preaches not his own words but those given him by God for the occasion.) A.'s regular recourse to scriptural language is a sign of a deliberate attempt to accept--or to appropriate--the divine language for his own discourse.

ecce: 115x in conf., evenly distributed; less common in his other works of sustained exposition (over a comparable amount of text in civ., 17x, in trin., 24x), but common in en. Ps. (85x in one sample of comparable length). A spoken punctuation mark, adding emphasis.

quo: Wijdeveld (REAug 5[1959], 33), proposed repunctuation: `angusta est domus animae meae. Quo venias ad eam, dilatetur abs te.' Against that punctuation is the arrangement of the following two sentences (`refice eam' parallels `dilatetur abs te', while `quae offendant oculos tuos' offers a parallel for the subordinate clause) and the construction itself: in conf.quo introduces a purpose clause without comparative (LHS 679-680) at least three times (6.13.23, 8.3.7, 9.12.32), but in those cases the quo-clause comes second in the sentence. It is not easy to find parallels for the construction and arrangement Wijdeveld proposes.

tu scis: Knauer 76-77 lists the nineteen occurrences of `tu scis', an expression with strong biblical and Psalmish overtones. The phrase emphasizes the personal tone, and is markedly `confessional'. God could tell this story better than A., if only he would.

qui veritas es: Jn. 14.6, `ego sum via, et veritas, et vita.' The nouns of that sentence, esp. via and veritas, are extremely common in conf.. Are we to assume that at each occurrence, A. means us to think of via or veritas as another name of the second person of the trinity? Had he so imbibed the teaching of scripture that there is no question of what he `means us to think' but simply of what he himself habitually thought? On the available evidence, it is hard to rule out the Christological overtones of those words; see on via at 7.7.11; on veritas at 10.23.33. But questions of author's intention are difficult (as A. himself says at length: 12.23.32) and lead to no verifiable conclusions. Better not to prescribe to these words what they must mean, but to allow them at every turn to mean what, on the purely textual evidence of A.'s writings and without speculation as to his intentions, they certainly may have meant. If in this way we arrive at a reading of conf. that is more expressly Christ-centered than some would think A. intended, but a reading demonstrably in the spirit of his texts, something of value has been gained.

1.6.7

The most sensitive and successful attempt to read A.'s treatment of infancy in light of modern psychological interpretation is M. Miles, Jour. Amer. acad. Rel. 50(1982), 349-364. See also B. Shaw, Past and Present 115 (May, 1987), 3-51.

The emphasis in conf. is on the inclination to irrational conduct already in infants; later A. chose to emphasize their suffering as a sign of the burden of original sin. Non-polemically, at trin. 14.5.7 he inquires whether the mind of an infant can be said to know itself--unlikely for they are so eager to gobble up the sensible world that if you leave them with a night-light where they can see it, they will develop a squint from staring at it all night long. Polemically, a raft of texts from the anti-Pelagian period and especially against Julian can be instanced, e.g., c. Iul. imp. 2.22, `catholica illa est, quae ostendit iustum deum in tot ac tantis poenis et cruciatibus parvulorum' . See also c. Iul. 4.16.83, c. Iul. imp. 3.48, 3.154 (reminiscent of conf.: `natosque ipsos omnes flentes, sero ridentes, serius loquentes et hoc balbutientes, in scholas postea duci ut litteras discant, sub loris ferulis virgisque plorantes, pro varietatibus ingeniorum distributa varietate poenarum'), and 3.187. At c. Iul. 4.60, A. is careful to show that his melancholy view finds precedent in Cicero's de republica; on the classical view and its Christian permutations, see A. Goulon, REAug 18(1972), 3-26.

vitam mortalem an mortem vitalem: `in this life that dies, this death that lives.' Cf. Lucr. 3.869, `mortalem vitam mors cum immortalis ademit'.

nescio: At every stage of A.'s life, he refused to take a definite position on the origin of the soul, an ambivalence he later compared to the canniness of the sailor avoiding Scylla and Charybdis: nat. et or. an. 2.13.18. The fundamental doubt is expressed early: lib. arb. 3.21.59, `harum autem quatuor de anima sententiarum, (1) utrum de propagine veniant, (2) an in singulis quibusque nascentibus novae fiant, an in corpora nascentium iam alicubi existentes (3) vel mittantur divinitus, (4) vel sua sponte labantur, nullam temere adfirmare oportebit. aut enim nondum ista quaestio a divinorum librorum catholicis tractatoribus pro merito suae obscuritatis et perplexitatis evoluta atque inlustrata est, aut si iam factum est, nondum in manus nostras huiuscemodi litterae pervenerunt.' For his late insistence on his ignorance, retr. 1.1.3, `nam quod attinet ad eius originem, qua fit ut sit in corpore, utrum de illo uno sit qui primum creatus est, quando factus est homo in animam vivam, an similiter fiant singulis singuli, nec tunc sciebam nec adhuc scio.' For the best statement of what he was willing to affirm, dating from not too long after conf., see Gn. litt. 7.28.43; see generally Gn. litt. books 7 and 10 (with note at BA 49.537-539 on the significance of the problem for infant baptism) and the later (anti-Pelagian) nat. et or. an. For the most authoritative presentation and interpretation of the evidence (including the nuances that emerged in A.'s later works), see O'Daly 15-20 and 199-203. For the minority position of R. J. O'Connell, who holds that at Cassiciacum, and for some time after, A. inclined to the third or fourth of these views (which on that reading he owed mainly to Plotinus), see his St. Augustine's Early Theory of Man, A.D. 386-391 (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 148-152; the thesis is revised, expanded, and defended with vigor if not circumspection in his The Origin of the Soul in St. Augustine's Later Works (New York, 1987). O'Connell's position refuses to acknowledge A.'s willingness to leave such a significant question radically open and not feel a philosopher's qualm that his system is thus undermined. A. had no system, despite what we try to make of him, but found himself following the teachings of a God who did not always make everything perfectly clear. A. managed, with great difficulty, to make his peace with the uncertainties of that condition: not all his students since have been so successful.

A.'s agnosticism gave him both advantage and disadvantage in polemical situations. To be noncommittal on an essential issue left him open to one kind of criticism, but to have asserted any form of transmission of souls from Adam would have given Pelagians more grounds for attacking A. as a crypto-Manichee (cf. c. Iul. imp. 2.178), and he was also eager himself to avoid taking a position the Manichees could attack (c. Fort. 11., `si quaeris utrum a deo descenderit anima, magna quidem quaestio est; sed sive a deo descendit sive non, illud de anima respondeo non esse deum').

formasti: At civ. 13.24, A. prefers to render Gn. 2.7, e)/plasen (of the creation of Adam and Eve), by formavit rather than finxit. See on 12.3.3 for species/forma and Bk. 12 generally for `formatio' in creation.

non enim ego memini: `non . . . memini' again at 1.6.8, 1.6.10, 1.7.11, and 1.7.12--all dealing with infancy; see on 6.5.7 for the importance of such examples in persuading the adult A. that faith has a place in our scheme of knowledge. At util. cred. 12.26 he argues that fides has a place in human affairs because you have to believe your mother for who your father is, and nurses and midwives and servants for who your mother is; sim. at ep. 147.5. On the numerous inadequacies of memory in conf., see the express discussion of forgetfulness at 10.16.24 and Courcelle, Recherches 32-35.

A.'s mother plays, as many know who never read this work, a large part in his narrative and in his life. We must forego that knowledge to see the slow development of her character in the narrative. This first allusion to her is noteworthy for its ambivalence: in the mist of infant oblivion, not surely distinguished from the wet nurses she employed. (With younger siblings [at least one sister and one brother: cf. Mandouze, Pros. chr. s.v. Monnica], A. could recall clearly other nurses like those who had tended him.) For implicit criticism, cf. en. Ps. 49.27, `sunt enim matres quae cum pepererint, dant nutricibus; illae quae pepererunt, non fovent filios suos, quia nutriendos dederunt.'

alimentum: L. C. Ferrari, Aug. Stud. 9(1978), 1-14, counts `no less than one hundred and fifty different words connected with the acts of eating and drinking' in conf.

ordinatum affectum: On the trinitarian view of humanity, affectus represents the will in action, and as such the part of the human being that corresponds to the third person of the trinity (see on 13.11.12); ordo, in another of A.'s triads (modus/species/ordo: see on 1.7.12), represents the action of the same third person of the trinity. Ordinatus affectus, then, is carefully phrased to identify the place of the impulse to offer nourishment both in human affairs (whence it arises) and in divine affairs (whence it is governed)--the love of a mother that offers this nurture is human love in harmony with divine love.

intus et foris: 34x and 19x respectively in conf., signally at 10.27.38 (q.v.). It would be possible to ascribe the prominence of this disjunction in A. and his successors to a philosophical influence (comparanda can be found in neo-Platonism) or to a late antique psychic alienation; but both hypotheses are in the end unverifiable. There is no comprehensive treatment of the theme in A.; best is a collection of texts with some comments and a few parallels at Courcelle, Recherches ed. 2, 393-404; for conf., see W. Schmidt-Dengler, REAug 14(1968), 69-89; and there is much in P. Cambronne, Recherches sur la structure de l'imaginaire dans les Confessions de saint Augustin (microfiche thèse, Paris, 1982). See also `Foris-intus', Aug.-Lex. (forthcoming).

tunc: The tension between past and present is marked by the adverbs tunc and nunc, for whose intricate interplay see J. Morán, Augustinianum 8(1968), 147-154.

delectationibus: sc. carnis meae. The infant is almost an Epicurean: cf. Cic. fin. 1.16.54., for the appeal of such a view by a proponent as A. would have known it: `quodsi . . . voluptas autem est sola quae nos vocet ad se et alliciat suapte natura, non potest esse dubium quin id sit summum atque extremum bonorum omnium, beateque vivere nihil aliud sit nisi cum voluptate vivere.' For the licit role of delectatio, see on 1.1.1; in Bk. 1, delectare and delectatio are mainly negative and self-indulgent: 1.9.15, 1.15.24, 1.16.26, 1.19.30. Anticipation of better things returns near the end of the book at 1.18.28 (`sitientem delectationes tuas') and 1.20.31 (`veritate delectabar').

vere similia: vere similia ODonnell scripsi: veresimilia C D G O1 S Skut. Ver.: verisimilia O2 Maur. Knöll Pell.
The question here is not the relation of the signa to the truth (verisimilitude was a central concern of the Academics, to whom A. turned later: see on 5.10.19), but their resemblance to (and hence effectiveness at communicating) Augustine's velleities. He claims that his first discovery in the realm of human communication was the arbitrariness of signs and the inability of signs in and of themselves to communicate voluntates (without some prior convention of agreement). For similar wordplay, cf. c. acad. 3.10.23, `istam sententiam Carneades falsae esse similem doceat.'

non subditis maioribus et liberis non servientibus: The oxymorons underscore the misdirection of the infant's first expressions of voluntas.

1.6.9

The juxtaposition of present and past time is a leit-motif, recapitulated in full in Bk. 10. The evocation of the divine present (from `tu autem domine') gives those juxtapositions a context. There is, nevertheless, a perceptible difference in texture between what we may call the narrative juxtaposition (see, e.g., on 1.6.7, `non enim ego memini'), where the tension is between the two versions of the past, as lived and as recalled, and this more substantive contrast, between the past as lived and the present state of the author. One effect of the frequent recourse to this substantive contrast is to keep the reader's awareness rooted in the author's present, not in the narrative past. Some narratives are framed by a narrator's present, where an author sets a scene, presents one or more characters, and creates a mood within which to place the narrative placed in the mouth of one of his own characters (even, or especially, when that narrator is identified with the author). The effect of that device may be to make the narrative itself seem yet more authentic: one thinks of such disparate works as the Sherlock Holmes stories, Moby-Dick, and Heart of Darkness. This book, however, is different, and the analogues in our literature fewer--Dante's Vita Nuova comes to mind.

instabilium . . . : Cf. 1.4.4, `stabilis . . . immutabilis . . . numquam novus, numquam vetus'; n.b. below, `misericors misero'. A.'s zeal for distinguishing and defining leads him to risk that God will seem to be no more than the antithesis of creation (or creation only the antithesis of God); these juxtapositions, however, depend on the verbal sense of paradox they evoke to suggest the relationship between God and creature--it is in that relationship (and only in that relationship, A. hints) that both are known.

inrationalium: inrationalium O S Knöll Skut. Ver.: inrationabilium C D G Maur.13.32.47 (`inrationabilibus') and 13.34.49 (`rationabilem') both imply creatures (or the actions of creatures) possessing the faculty of reason (the same is true of the three occurrences in en. Ps.: 42.7, 77.3, 82.3); rationalis, by contrast, means more nearly `formed according to ratio,' which suits the context here. (The line between the words is, however, not hard and clear in A.'s use over time.) The words, indeed the notion of ratio itself (see on 1.7.11), are notoriously un-Ciceronian: reason and reasonableness arise from other philosophical traditions, however indirectly.

vidi: The first person perfect is strong and vivid, used 4x in conf. of eyewitness testimony (1.7.11 [2x], 6.3.3); see on 7.10.16 for its adaptation to mystical experience.

dulcedo: Not used to address God in Vg., but cf. Ps. 30.20, 67.11 (`in dulcedine tua'); used both in address (1.4.4, 1.20.31, `dulcedo mea et honor meus et fiducia mea' --see notes there, 2.1.1, `dulcedo non fallax, dulcedo felix et secura') and of abstract nouns and metaphors closely associated with God (8.1.2, 9.6.14, 10.3.4 [sim. at 13.23.33], 10.40.65, `introrsus ad nescio quam dulcedinem' , 12.9.9, 13.30.45); identified with divine iustitia at civ. 21.24; much earlier, cf. ep. 11.4 (388/91, to Nebridius: suavitas associated with the third person of the trinity). Such metaphor is slippery when applied to God: it seems that we know of sweetness in ordinary life, and predicate a greater, more perfect sweetness of our conception of God. A. would hold that this procedure is a necessary consequence of the fall of language, but that insofar as the expression is true and useful it is rather that the sweetness that we know in ordinary life is a pale reflection of the authentic and original sweetness of God. See J. Ziegler, Dulcedo dei (= Alttestamentliche Abhandlungen 13.2, Münster 1937); on A., pp. 88-98 (with abundant references).

1.6.10

This `confessional' paragraph is interposed between the more or less objective description of infancy and the (more famous) moral assessment of 1.7.11. The meditation on time anticipates Bk. 11 (Knauer 108n2).

muliercularum: The diminutive is pejorative; elsewhere in conf. only at 6.14.24, derisively of the wives and wives-to-be whose objections derailed the plan for a community in philosophical retirement; elsewhere in A., rare and always pejorative; e.g., en. Ps. 103. s. 4.7.

A.'s mature doctrine of original sin was far from inevitable in 397. From the vast literature, most pertinent and interesting here is A. Sage's study at REAug 13(1967), 212-248, though many would differ with some details of his reconstruction; the case for greater continuity and less development is made by P. Rigby, Original Sin in Augustine's `Confessions' (Ottawa, 1987). More venturesome is the attempt of P. F. Beatrice, Tradux peccati (Milan, 1978), to affiliate A.'s doctrine in second century Encratite teachings; such a context helps explain the intensity of the reaction A. stirred up. The shifts over time are perhaps more clearly visible when looked at in a less theological way: see W. Eborowicz, Studia Patristica 14(1976), 410-416. A. himself speaks in defense of the consistency of his position, but he is unlikely to convince the most careful readers of his own works: c. Iul. 6.13.39, `nam ego per unum hominem in mundum intrasse peccatum, et per peccatum mortem, et ita in omnes homines pertransisse, in quo peccaverunt omnes, ab initio conversionis meae sic tenui semper ut teneo. exstant libri quos adhuc laicus recentissima mea conversione conscripsi, etsi nondum sicut postea sacris litteris eruditus, tamen nihil de hac re iam tunc sentiens, et ubi disputandi ratio poposcerat dicens, nisi quod antiquitus discit et docet omnis ecclesia.' The term `original sin' enters A.'s writings in div. qu. Simp. 1.1.10-11, expounding Rom. 7.18-20 (2x; at 1.1.11, `quod perficere bonum non est in potestate, ad meritum pertinet originalis peccati'), recurring next at conf.5.9.16, and infrequently thereafter until the Pelagian controversy.12 A useful comparandum for div. qu. Simp. is lib. arb. 3.20.55 (prob. 395), where everything but the term is already present.

indignari: Recalls 1.6.8, `indignabar'; the verb specifies anger directed at another apart from any action taken to give the anger force--cf. 9.4.8. As with the first smiles (see on 1.6.8), A. oversteps himself by failing to distinguish observation from interpretation. For him an infant is a small adult, lacking various powers but experiencing the world just as an adult would. He cannot speak or make his indignatio efficacious, but he is capable of all the emotions and the velleities that arise from them. Such a view of the infant is eminently compatible with a doctrine of infant baptism, but is philosophically problematic.

dicunt: In the absence of exact parallels, it is unclear whether some particular superstition is implied; the use of expiare leads in that direction. Of 91x in A., only here is expiation in any sense trivial; the only passage even remotely comparable in weakness of offence is ep. 167.6.20, `peccata cotidiana, sine quibus hic non vivitur, cotidianis remediis expientur'). The ordinary mode of `expiation' is sacrifice, often in OT contexts, and sometimes contrasted to the regeneration of baptism: e.g., nat. et or. an. 2.15.21, `nec abluendas baptismo nec expiandas Christi corporis et sanguinis sacrificio et in aeternum damnandas'; though baptism can have `expiatory' effect as well when the contrast is not being emphasized: e.g., ep. 157.3.13, `a quo delicto parvuli per baptismum expiantur'. Thus it is likely that the nurses found the infant behavior disturbing and used means to `expiate' that it were some form of `pagan' ritual. (The one `pagan' practice to which A. applies the word elsewhere is at en. Ps. 57.4, `respondet forte aliqua dura et mala mathematicus; curritur ad aruspicem ut expietur; respondet haruspex non se posse expiare; maleficus quaeritur.' There the sacrificial implication is probably also present; cf. conf.4.2.3, where consulting a haruspex implies consenting to sacrifice.) Cf. en. Ps. 30. en. 2 s. 2.12, `forte utiliter et in malum incidisti quem bonum putasti, ut in ubere quasi materno amaritudinem invenires, et ea offensione repellereris, et ad cibum validiorem invitareris. faciunt enim hoc nutrices mammothreptis, ut aliqua amara ponant in papillis suis, quibus offensi parvuli ab ubere resiliant et ad mensam inhient.' (The same lore at s. 311.17.14.)

licet probes: The generic second person is rare in conf. (here a momentary lapse in the nominal address of the whole text to God), and here with the only occurrence of licet governing subjunctive in a main clause (but licet only 5x in conf.).

1.7.12

This apostrophe marks the conclusion of the treatment of infantia, the speechless time before memory, to be followed (1.8.13) by pueritia that brought speech and initiated memory. There are parallels here to 1.20.31, the concluding paragraph on pueritia.

quod: `for the reason that', explaining `iubes me laudare' below: n.b. `in istis', resuming the content of the quod-clause. Arts 95-6 counts 38 quod-causal with indicative, 32 with subjunctive; she claims that his use of the moods follows regular classical practice, but n.b. that here the subjunctive could have been employed, to ascribe the reason to the will of God--but `ut videmus' emphasizes the factuality of the reason. Quia occurs 444x (15x already in Bk. 1, where this is the first quod-causal).

instruxisti . . .: Theological preoccupation and rhetorical habit join forces: three actions of God regarding individual aspects of the infant's bodily life (`instruxisti sensibus, compegisti membris, figura decorasti') are followed by a single action affecting the whole (`proque eius universitate': cf. 1.20.31, `meamque incolumitatem, vestigium secretissimae unitatis' --and see on 1.20.31 for the trinitarian sense there). To ascribe a conscious trinitarian intent and to deny a trinitarian resonance would be equally rash.

proque: `and on behalf of', i.e., `in order to assure' its `completeness in oneness' and `safety' --all the efforts of the `living being' (animantis: a careful word here, used elsewhere in the singular only at 1.20.31, `in tali animante'; in plural elsewhere of `living things', e.g. 4.2.3, `necaturus . . . in sacrificiis suis animantia').

By modus A. understands `manner of being' and thinks of the initial creation of unformed matter and hence sees a parallel to the creative act of the first person of the trinity. The concept arises in Ciceronian texts and is present in A. as a unique synthesis of Platonic and Ciceronian ideas from the first works at Cassiciacum: see du Roy 152-158 and B. J. Cooke, Modern Schoolman 23(1946), 180-182 and 24(1947), 44-45.

Species was interchangeable with forma in Latin to represent Plato's i)de/a as early as Cicero; in A. at div. qu. 46.2, `ideas igitur latine possumus vel formas vel species dicere', and cf. Tusc. 1.24.58 and or. 3.10 and 29.101. In particular, forma occurs for the plural (where species is rare: cf. Cic. top. 7.30) and formare supplies the lack of any verb derived from species. By species A. means (from sol. 2.18.32 on) `principle of individuation or differentiation', both the outward appearance and the intrinsic structure (Mayer, Zeichen 2.148), by which the unformed matter is made into a unique created thing. Hence he sees a parallel to the action of the creative Word; species is the sine qua non of existence (imm. an. 8.13-15). The dialectical antithesis of species is therefore corruptio (c. ep. fund. 40.46, `species aucta cogit esse et deum fatemur summe esse; corruptio vero aucta cogit non esse, et constat quod non est nihil esse'). Cf. also du Roy 288.15

Modus and species, products of the first two stages of creation, present a world of isolated things, which is given pattern and dynamic (anything but the docile stasis we might expect in medieval ideas of order) by the addition of ordo, the animating and governing force of the third person of the trinity. The ordo of ord. is cosmic and irresistible--even evil is subsumed in it (ord. 2.7.23; cf. mor. 2.6.8), but in the watershed div. qu. Simp. 1.2.18 (see R. A. Markus, Conversion and Disenchantment [Villanova, 1989], 25) inordinatio is explicitly identified with peccatum; from then on in A.'s thought, the old high notion of cosmic order exists side by side with a dynamic view that allows for momentary disorder arising from sin, to be put right quickly enough by God. So civ. 15.22, `unde mihi videtur quod definitio brevis et vera virtutis ordo est amoris; propter quod in sancto cantico canticorum cantat sponsa Christi, civitas dei: ordinate in me caritatem. [Cant. 2.4]' See also the close ties between ordo and pax expounded at length at civ. 19.13-20; for the association of ordo and pondus, cf. s. 242.3.5-7.9, on the ordo ponderum (see also on 13.9.10 below), and s. Casin. 1.133.1, `inordinate amans deficit sub pondere passionis' . The standard discussion of the ordo amoris is Burnaby 113-137. So vera rel. 41.77, `nihil enim est ordinatum quod non sit pulchrum. et, sicut ait apostolus, omnis ordo a deo est' (where the latter phrase, representing Rom. 13.1, is a misquotation under the influence of the idea of `order'; at retr. 1.13.8 he owns to the error, for Paul actually wrote `quae autem sunt a deo ordinata sunt').

For the triad read in light of the neo-Platonic tradition (Gk.: ou)si/a, ei)=dos, ta/cis), see W. Theiler, P.u.A. 11-12 and esp. 32-34, who makes of Wisd. 11.21 a mere pretext, or scriptural corroboration. Even if we accept Theiler's (questionable) willingness to see in disparate elements attested in Porphyry a source for a clear and repeated pattern of expression in A., surely it was as much the coincidence of scriptural and Platonic doctrine that impressed A. in a matter such as this as it was either element independently.16 (The most careful refutation of Theiler's assertion of Porphyry as the source of A.'s triad theology is du Roy 402-408.) The triad has evident connections with a view ascribed to Aristotle on the first page of Amb.'s exameron (1.1.1): `alii quoque, ut Aristoteles cum suis disputandum putavit, duo principia ponerent, materiam et speciem, et tertium cum his, quod operatorium dicitur, cui subpeteret competenter efficere quod adoriendum putasset.' The origins of that doctrine and its transmission are studied at length in J. Pépin, Théologie cosmique et théologie chrétienne (Paris, 1964), but he does not explore the connection to A.; for operatorium, note especially mor. 1.16.27, `cumque ibi dictum sit, dei filium, dei virtutem esse atque sapientiam: cumque virtus ad operationem [3], sapientia vero ad disciplinam [2] pertinere intellegatur . . .';17 also mor. 2.6.8, Gn. litt. imp. 4.12 quoted below, and Gn. litt. imp. 15.51. The exameron consists of sermons delivered by Ambrose, probably during Holy Week, perhaps in 386.18 Another possible partial precedent is Hilary of Poitiers, whose de trinitate 2.1 is quoted and discussed in trin. 6.10.11 (twenty years after conf.) for the triad `aeternitas in patre [1], species in imagine [2], usus in munere [3].' A.'s discussion there refines that triad to unitas/species/ordo (trin. 6.10.12).

The pattern of this triad also matches another triad imprinted on A.'s way of thinking: the rhetorical distinction of three kinds of quaestiones from at least Cicero on in Latin: Cic. or. 14.45, `quidquid est quod in controversia aut in contentione versetur, in eo aut sitne aut quid sit aut quale sit quaeritur' (see on 10.10.17, `tria genera esse quaestionum, an sit, quid sit, quale sit,' for other references to Cicero, Quintilian, and Martianus Capella). A. himself mentions the three kinds of questions in works (div. qu. 18. and ep. 11.4, both passages cited above) almost contemporaneous with the extensive use of the triad in vera rel. (du Roy 385-386: du Roy does not want to see here a `source' [as had A. Schindler, Wort und Analogie in Augustins Trinitätslehre (Tübingen, 1965), 56-60]; it is best to take this as an example of the practice du Roy [386] describes: `Augustin charge souvent des expressions de sa culture latine et surtout cicéronienne d' un sens néo-platonicien qui en est une réinterprétation').

The three dialogues of Cassiciacum are not without interest in light of this triad. c. acad. is devoted to the nature of truth; beata v. ends (4.34-35: quoted above) with an extensive and important discussion of modus that links that concept to the first person of the trinity; and the third dialogue is expressly about ordo. Note further that beata v. and ord. each record dialogues that extended over three days, while c. acad. is broken in two sections of three days each. There are twelve days of discussion in all, and seven days elapse between the two halves of c. acad. See on 9.4.7 for the probability that beata v. and c. acad. are constructed to end, with expressly Christian remarks, on Sundays.

The six days of creation, the six ages of human history, and the six ages of a man: each of these schemes throws light on the others for A., and each is finally referred to the sabbath they share, the day of rest without beginning or end that is reached in anticipation on the last page of conf. A.'s narrative of his early life in Bks. 1-7 follows this pattern, which is then abandoned (a reason for this is suggested below). L. Pizzolato, Le `Confessioni' di sant'Agostino (Milan, 1968), saw in the six age pattern the underlying structure of conf. as a whole: in so doing, he (a) minimizes A.'s abandonment of the pattern after Bk. 7, (b) fails to do justice to other important structural elements in the text, and (c) finally succumbs to the temptation to think that a work of the breadth and complexity of conf. can be interpreted authoritatively in terms of a single key pattern. With those reservations, however, it must be said that the pattern he detects is present, one among several.

The other explicit texts from this scheme are 2.1.1 (`exarsi enim aliquando satiari inferis in adulescentia') and 7.1.1 (`iam mortua erat adulescentia mea mala et nefanda et ibam in iuventutem'). No further mention is made of the pattern, but it should be borne in mind that A. at the time of writing c. 397 was approaching the next juncture of ages on that scheme, the one separating iuventus from the fifth age (variously named: see below) at age 45;22 the last boundary, crossed at age 60, found A. at another decisive moment in his literary career, finishing several major works while beginning civ. and the anti-Pelagian campaign. The pattern employed here is entirely literary and textual, perhaps anachronistic (P. Veyne, A History of Private Life [Cambridge, Mass., 1987], 1.23-25): A. interpreted his life by a textual tradition.

For concise treatment with refs., see B. Kötting and W. Geerlings, Aug.-Lex. 1.150-158. For backgrounds, see A. Luneau, L'histoire du salut chez les Pères de l'église: La doctrine des âges du monde (Paris, 1964), and G. Ladner, The Idea of Reform (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 222-238. Ladner traces (224) the correlation between the six days and the six historical ages to Ps.-Barnabas, Justin and Irenaeus; its origins are related to millenarism--six historical ages of 1000 years each, ending in the final millennium; A. himself has millenarian tendencies in his earlier writings (e.g., s. 259.2 [393? certainly not after 400], `octavus ergo iste dies in fine saeculi novam vitam significat: septimus quietem futuram sanctorum in hac terra'; he qualifies his earlier opinions at civ. 20.7, `etiam nos hoc opinati fuimus aliquando'; cf. G. Folliet REAug 2[1956], 371-390 and see on 13.35.50, `pacem sabbati'). More recently J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man (Oxford, 1986), 61 underscores the significance of the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Mt. 20.1-8), treated since Origen as a five-age scheme. (A. once adapts this by skipping infantia: s. 49.2.2; at another, he forces the pattern by omitting adulescentia: s. 87.5.7.) Burrow is good on the medieval literary afterlife, while E. Sears, The Ages of Man (Princeton, 1986), emphasizes visual materials in the tradition.

The scheme is clearly not carried beyond the turn from adulescentia to iuventus at 7.1.1. Then conversion supervenes and the pattern is abandoned. One relevance of this is that the conversion occurs when A. is about the same age as that at which Christ was crucified, as A. noted at s. 88.10.9, `natus est de virgine Maria. . . . per aetates cucurrit usque ad iuventutem. . . . infantiae pueritia, pueritiae adolescentia, adolescentiae iuventus transeunti cedentique successit.' Since conversion entails death, burial, and rebirth in Christ (i.e., baptism: see on 9.1.1), the pattern is complete and parallel--howbeit only implicitly so--in Christ and in A.

didiceram: didiceram O S Knöll Skut. Ver.: didicerim C D G Maur.
Indicative in indirect question is well-attested in conf. (35x, against c. 120x subjunctive), but it is a laxity he does not allow himself so frequently in civ. (indicative only 6x in the whole work: figures from Arts 94).

Prensabam is preferable for the palaeographical reason that all the other readings may be explained as deriving from it and for the substantive reason that it well depicts the infant who would speak grasping willfully at the words, as well as the things, of his world--and A.'s memory is a storehouse of such acquisitions (10.8.12-14). The verb is not otherwise attested in A., but occurs 4x in the Aeneid, a reputable authority for A.'s use. Note `tenebam' just below, common in A. in the sense of `hold in memory' (see on 1.13.20), and continuing the implied metaphor. (Note also that penso is regularly used without a specifying instrumental ablative in the sense `to weigh in the mind, ponder, consider' [OLD]; to use it here with mente and memoria would be doubly redundant. In A., moreover, the word is used 40+ times, most often in contexts where something is to be evaluated; the only cases with an instrumental ablative: ep. 258.2, `[res humanas] rerum divinarum cognitione pensamus'; civ. 9.4, `pari tamen aestimatione pensentur').

The punctuation is difficult. The Maurists read praesonabam (Pusey translates: `practise the sounds in my memory') and placed the full stop after `memoria'. Knöll read pensabam with his favorite manuscript, and put the period after `omnibus' (G-M accepted his reading, but restored the original punctuation). Skutella retained the reading and the punctuation. Verheijen and Pellegrino abandon the reading--but all editors since 1935 retain the period before `p(r)ensabam'. (In its defense, see M. Burnyeat, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplemental Volume 1987, 2n3; but he did not realize that `prensabam' was an alternative, nor what it entailed.)

In avoiding a difficulty of syntax, however, these editors introduce a difficulty of sense. If their punctuation is followed, then `ego' has no expressed verb and one must be supplied. Sc. me docebam? `My elders taught me not, but rather I [taught myself], when the circumstances of infancy left me frustrated at being unable to express my will.' To which G-M: `it would perhaps have been more in accordance with A.'s style to write sed ego me ipsum, but the sentence ends awkwardly with the long subordinate clause, and the next begins abruptly.' Is not the logical connection between the frustration expressed by the cum-clauses and the grasping reaction expressed by `prensabam'? `My elders taught me not, but rather I, when the circumstances of infancy left me frustrated at being unable to express my will, grasped with my memory: when they named something, I . . .' It is true (and indeed notable) that mens and memoria overlap significantly for A. (mens does not appear at all in the discussion of memory in Bk. 10: when A. needs a word there with similar meaning, he uses animus); if the two appear here guiltily yoked in syntax, the best explanation seems to be a slight anacoluthon caused by the length of the intervening clauses. (The reading memoriam [in MSS AHVG] is a vulgar error independently arrived at; note that it makes nonsense of G's own reading of the verb, praesonabam.)

voluntatum enuntiandarum: Speech begins in the fallen man as the assertion of voluntas; cf. 1.6.8 and note that the present paragraph contains: `vellem', `voluntati', `volebam', `volebam', `vellent', `velle', `voluntates', `voluntatum', as well as like expressions (e.g., `affectionem animi in petendis, habendis, reiciendis fugiendisve rebus'). The speech Augustine acquired as a puer was thus not the divine gift that he prayed for at 1.5.5 (`miserere ut loquar').

communicavi: `shared', but in the active sense from which arises the sense retained in English `communicate'.

auctoritate: 32x in conf., frequent in civ., less obtrusive in en. Ps. The usage here is not identical with the common Christian application to scripture, but that is also common in A. (6.5.8, `auctoritate sanctarum litterarum'). As used here, it represents a characteristic concern of A., one that emerges in his writing from his lifelong dialogue with the classical past. At every stage of the search he narrates in conf., A. is seeking a reason to abandon himself to authoritative doctrine, and seeking a doctrine to which to attribute this authority. Auctoritas is notably, as here, a parental quality.

1.9.14

A. spent a quarter century in the schools of literary culture of late antiquity. The standard work on the implications of this immersion is Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique; that can now be supplemented on some aspects from R. A. Kaster, Guardians of Language (Berkeley, 1988).

in scholam: On elementary and secondary education, see R. A. Kaster, TAPA 113(1983), 323-346, arguing against a rigid distinction between the two categories. H. Chadwick, Augustine (Oxford, 1986), 7: `He never wrote with admiration or gratitude about any of his teachers.'

L.C. Ferrari, Aug. Stud. 5(1974), 1-14, links these beatings to the image of the scourging God found in A.; elsewhere in conf. at 2.2.4, 3.3.5, 4.1.1, 6.6.9 (`baculo disciplinae tuae confringebas ossa mea'), 8.11.25, 9.4.12; earliest, according to Ferrari, in quotations of Heb. 12.6 in div. qu. 73. and Gn. c. man.; see Ferrari for other references to God as the scourge of human wickedness in A. Ferrari thinks Patricius was the sort of father likely to beat his children (since he seems to have beaten his wife: 9.9.19), but admits there is no evidence. A. makes much of schoolhouse beatings and not of any at home.

invenimus: The first narrated encounter with the Christian religion, in the observation of others' prayer and the attempt to imitate it. He ascribes the failure of that first attempt, the first in a long series of false starts to be narrated, to the faulty knowledge of God on which it was based (`sentientes te, ut poteramus, esse magnum aliquem'). A. regularly emphasizes accurate knowledge of God as a prerequisite for spiritual progress, with the most explicit discussion from 7.1.1. Note `invocationem' and cf. with discussion above on 1.1.1ff--especially for the way invocatio unties his tongue and makes speech possible where before there was silence; confessio could have begun here, but did not.

non erat ad insipientiam mihi: The phrase is difficult, reflecting the LXX: kai\ ou)k ei)s a)/noian e)moi\; the Hebrew has a different sense. A.'s own translators have not achieved either clarity or mutual agreement; best is Pusey, `not thereby giving me over to foolishness.' The leap of thought for A. seems to have been: `you heeded not my prayer, so that I would not end in folly (which would have been the result had you granted my wish).'en. Ps. 21. en. 2.4, `sed non ad insipientiam, sed ad sapientiam.' (The same etymological opposition at, e.g., Cic. fin. 1.14.46. and Tusc. 3.5.10 [`ita fit ut sapientia sanitas sit animi, insipientia autem quasi insanitas quaedam'].) The word is rare in CL, but more common in scripture representing Gk. a)/noia. Elsewhere in A. in passages echoing this verse: en. Ps. 43.2, 53.5 (`ut intellegerem quid a te petere deberem'), 59.7, civ. 21.14, ep. 140.7.19 (and often in that letter).

mali: A. has no rigorous distinction between malum as a term for moral evil (`wrong-doing') and malum as a term for natural evil (`suffering': here `who wanted nothing bad to happen to me'); the former meaning greatly preponderates. Though he repeatedly asks (from 3.7.12 to 7.7.11) `unde malum,' in all of conf., only the following passages besides the present one certainly refer to natural evil: 3.8.16 (`vel evitandi mali . . . vel sola voluptate alieni mali'), 7.5.7 (`certe vel timor ipse malum est') and in a medical context 8.3.7 (`et vena eius malum renuntiat').

1.9.15

When he wrote these lines, A. would have recognized with a wry smile the sentiments of a child's prayer at baptism recorded in Eustratius, vita Eutychii 8 (PG 86.2283-2284; sixth century): ku/rie, a)gaqo\n nou=n xa/risai/ moi, i(/na ma/qw ta\ gra/mmata kai\ nikw= tou\s e(tai/rous mou.

estne . . . affligebamur?: G-M: `An unusually long, invertebrate sentence.' We are to imagine a devout man, so devout that when faced himself with the tortures of the state, he thinks nothing of them (though others fear them bitterly)--the measurement of how little he thinks of them is the unconcern of parents over the punishment of their children in school. Just as we marvel at the unconcern of the martyr, so the child marvels at the unconcern of his parents.

diligens: G-M: `concessive, though he loves.'BA follows for its translation the correction found in one manuscript (and printed by the Maurists), deridens.

minus ea metuebamus aut minus: sc. quam homines qui tormenta metuunt.

et peccabamus tamen: The admission of actual sin, well-remembered: not for inability did he not study, but out of a delight in play. It never occurs to him that the child's idleness could be anything but culpable. The right of the teachers to punish this sin, on the other hand, is brought severely into question. The system in which young A. was being brought up was profoundly disordered and ungodly; it was not for his failure to participate in that system as such that he was worthy of punishment, but for other reasons (see next paragraph).

deformius: Adj./adv. in conf. used of those things that do not bear the pattern that God imparts (cf. 10.27.38, `et in ista formosa quae fecisti deformis inruebam')--a negative counterpart of the second person of the trinity (see above on 1.7.12).

quaestiuncula: The talent for quaestiunculae is one that A. exploited as a Manichee (3.12.21, `quod . . . nonnullis quaestiunculis iam multos imperitos exagitassem'). Ironic depreciation of pedantry is as essential to an educational system as pedantry itself; quaestiuncula in Latin has no other force (cf. Cic. de or. 1.22.102, `quid? mihi vos nunc inquit Crassus tamquam alicui graeculo otioso et loquaci et fortasse docto atque erudito quaestiunculam . . . ponitis?'). The irony can be pleasant and indulgent, or dismissive: in A., indulgent at epp. 13.2 (to Nebridius, still in the atmosphere of Cassiciacum), 37.3 (to Simplicianus), and 80.2 (to Paulinus and Therasia), dismissive at mag. 8.21, util. cred. 6.13, and c. Faust. 33.8 (and directed against A. by Petilian at c. litt. Pet. 3.52.64 and by Faustus at c. Faust. 1.2).

amore ludendi [3] . . . superbas victorias [1] . . . curiositate [2]: At 10.30.41, A. uses 1 Jn. 2.16 (`quoniam omne quod in mundo est, concupiscentia carnis est, et concupiscentia oculorum, et ambitio saeculi') to arrange the examination of conscience he there undertakes. This commentary will identify the earlier occasions where that triple pattern reflects itself in A.'s analysis of his fall into sin and dereliction and later in his narrative of his reascent to God's favor; see Kusch and prolegomena. W. Theiler, P.u.A. 37 insists that the pattern gains its hold over A. via Porphyry; as with the triad modus/species/ordo at 1.7.12, he holds that the scriptural text is pretext or corroboration for a philosophical doctrine. But here Theiler cannot show the three temptations as a triad in Porphyry; he begs the question by arguing, to prove that the origin is Porphyrian, that the triad occurs without the biblical citation at lib. arb. 2.19.53; similarly to show (as Theiler tries to do at P.u.A. 41-42) that A.'s treatment of the temptations in Bk. 10 reflects various unconnected passages of Porphyry's de abstinentia would not show a priority of influence, only a happy confluence (and some originality on A.'s part). R. J. O'Connell, Traditio 19(1963), 24ff, claims descent from Plotinus. See further on 10.30.41.

Here it seems certain that `amore ludendi' reflects the concupiscentia carnis [3] that will be A.'s most acute temptation, `superbas victorias' seems self-evidently to describe the fruit of the ambitio saeculi [1] (in other biblical translations sometimes superbia vitae), and `curiositate' [2] (n.b. `magis magisque per oculos emicante') represents concupiscentia oculorum. The presence of all three temptations in nuce here shows that the puer Augustine was completely innocent in no essential way: the decline traced through Bks. 2-5 is then not the primeval fall from grace, but a further fall into actual sin, leaving a double redemption for Bks. 6-9 to recount.

ad talia edenda: Whatever the niveau of A.'s family (see on 2.3.5), his education and career led him among the higher orders of late Roman society, where his education was naturally supposed to lead to a social eminence entailing public responsibilities. A. never completely joined that class, but never completely quit it either. Every page of civ., e.g., vaunts his savoir faire, even as he protests his aloofness.

1.11.17

audieram: The verb occurs 175x in conf., repeatedly, as here, for the means of transmission of Christian teachings, not always completely understood--cf. 7.3.5, `quod audiebam, liberum voluntatis arbitrium causam esse'. Here he emphasizes that already in boyhood he had heard the core of the gospel message and undergone sacramental initiation short of baptism. As many have said, A. was never a `pagan' in the conventional acceptation of that word; his assertion here is designed to make it clear that he was even more `without excuse' (Rom. 1.20, `ut sint inexcusabiles': see on 7.9.14) than the traditional `pagans'.

sacramentis: For sacramentum in A., see C. Couturier, in H. Rondet, et al., eds., études augustiniennes (Paris, 1953), 161-332; see also Mayer 1.284-331 and 2.454-457. The word occurs first at mor. 1.7.12 (of incarnation: `suscepti hominis sacramento'), recurs importantly in vera rel., a sign of the transformation already occurring in that work; and as a word that helps bridge the gap between things and signs: sacraments are signs that are also things (cf. doctr. chr. 1.2.2, etc.).

ita iam credebam: The observation is almost casual--for to A., without baptism, `faith' was of little value.

nisi pater solus: Patricius' status in a household where women led the way to Christianity was not uncommon (cf. P. Brown, JRS 51[1961], 1-11), nor was his deathbed baptism (9.9.22); Possidius, who knew conf. but was not overly attentive, could say of A. (vit. 1.1) that he was `parentibus honestis et christianis progenitus'. There is no evidence that there was ever anything `pagan' (i.e., devoted to cults other than Christian) about Patricius.

ut tu mihi pater esses: Ps. 26.10, `pater meus et mater mea dereliquerunt me; dominus autem adsumsit me'; en. Ps. 26. en. 2.18, `exceptis etiam illis duobus parentibus, de quorum carne nati sumus . . . habemus hic alium patrem et aliam matrem, vel potius habuimus. pater secundum saeculum diabolus est, et fuit nobis pater cum essemus infideles; nam infidelibus dicit dominus, vos a patre diabolo estis. [Jn. 8.44] . . . cognovimus alium patrem, deum; reliquimus diabolum.' We have thus an obscure description of a struggle that may not have been entirely the product of imagination. The tension of the sentence arises from M.'s duty to serve her husband, a duty that in some sense she violated in the struggle over A.'s paternity. A higher authority is invoked to justify her, but if the struggle was more than figurative (quarrels about religion, paternal opposition to distracting the boy with religion, etc.), her part must have seemed at least a daring one. `Tamen' and `non evicit' in the preceding sentence both seem to speak of the same struggle.

serviebat: See on 13.32.47 for A.'s habit of substituting servire for subdi when speaking of M. in terms of this scriptural language; as at 9.9.19, 9.13.37.

EXCURSUS: Mothers and Fathers in conf.

The other real-life mothers in conf. are noticeably less spiritual than Monnica, but the metaphorical applications are mainly generous if various (for metaphorical application to the church, see above): 3.10.18 (Manichean doctrine about plants), 3.12.21 (ex-Manichee Christian bishop given in youth to the Manichees by his own `seducta mater'), 5.5.9 (`a caritate matre sustinetur'), 6.1.1 (the mother of the son raised from dead at Lk. 7.12-15), 6.10.17 (Nebridius' mother not following him to Italy), 7.6.8 (mother of Firminus having a dream); 8.11.27 (`ipsa continentia nequaquam sterilis, sed fecunda mater filiorum gaudiorum'), 9.7.15 (mother of Valentinian), 9.8.17 (Monnica's mother, who neglected her daughter's welfare), 9.9.20 (Monnica's mother-in-law), 13.6.7 (`obsecro te per matrem caritatem'), 13.14.15 (`nox, mater iniquorum'), 13.19.24 (`honorem matris et patris et dilectionem proximi'), 13.32.47 (`herbarumque atque arborum mater'). On a specific maternal image applied to God, see on 4.1.1, `sugens lac tuum'.

On the other hand, a non-mortal pater is always God--there are no other metaphors: a much more limited role! A complete list of patres other than God or Patricius follows: most appear in no good light.

1.6.10 (ancestors generically), as also 3.2.3 (`deo patrum nostrorum'), 3.7.14 (`reprehendebam caecus pios patres [Veteris Testamenti]'), 6.7.11f (the father of Alypius, with whom A. quarreled), 7.6.8f (the father of Firminus, who had taught him astrology), 8.2.3 (the only non-physiological father: `Simplicianum, patrem in accipienda gratia tunc episcopi Ambrosii et quem vere ut patrem diligebat'), 9.8.17f (Monnica's father [also not in a good light]), 10.34.52 (Jacob, son of Isaac and father of Joseph), 13.18.23.

Most interesting, Patricius' death is only noted in passing at 3.4.7 (`iam defuncto patre ante biennium'), and at 3.6.10 we have the first vocative to God the Father (`mi pater summe bone'). The only earlier ref. to God as A.'s father is anticipatory here, `nam illa satagebat ut tu mihi pater esses'. See on 12.16.23 then for the eventual displacement of Monnica by `Hierusalem mater'.

On fathers and sons in A., see B. Shaw, Past and Present 115(1987), 19-28, interpreting A.'s `distant, formal and somewhat fearful' relations with Patricius as not uncommon in the time and place: `his concomitant attachment to his mother, brother and sister, do[es] not seem so unusual.' Indeed not, if we think of another ancient nuclear family that has had much attention in after times: the household of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

For the most responsible psychological interpretation arising out of these data, see C. Kligerman, Jour. Amer. Psychoan. Assoc. 5(1957), 469-484. He lays emphasis on the Dido/Monnica parallel (see on 5.8.15), suggesting that A. interprets his life as living out the same story he wept over as a child and sees in Faustus and Ambrose potential father figures, the first of whom disappoints, the second of whom never fully satisfies. (A reader who sets a higher value on baptism than Kligerman does would disagree: Ambrose does become A.'s father, but in an unexpected way, and that in another way it is God who becomes A.'s father, in accord with M.'s expressed wish here--and the fulfillment of such a mother's wish is significant). On the other hand, the suggestion made by Rebecca West in her Saint Augustine (London, 1930), and revived by E. TeSelle, Jour. Sci. Stud. Rel. 25(1986), 93-94, that A. came to resemble Patricius more and more as he aged (`increasingly high-handed, officious, authoritarian') is an elegant example of the cloud-ranching to which psychohistory can easily lead.

If of the three temptations (see above on 1.10.16), the one that A. least securely vanquishes is ambitio saeculi (see on 10.36.59ff), the implication remains in the air like mist that it is God the father with whom A. is never on completely comfortable terms. And of course, the theme of the prodigal son is as much about fathers and estrangement as it is about sons, and there are some surprising ramifications to that observation: see on 1.18.28.

1.11.18

vellem: The imperfect of an optative subjunctive denotes the wish as unaccomplished in present time, but the following clause, `si tu etiam velles', creates a present contrary-to-fact condition: A. does not know, because God does not will him to know. confessio forgoes wanting to know out of deference to that will of God, and thus separates itself from curiositas. Only the earthly reason for the delay (M.'s prudence) is specified below.

(non laxata) sunt: sunt C D G O1 Maur. Ver.: sint O2 S Knöll Skut.
The subjunctive is appropriate only if punctuated to include this clause in the preceding indirect question. The arrangement printed here (after Verheijen) is correct: `Was it for my good that the reins of sin were, after a fashion, loosed for me? Or were they really?' (De Marchi 310-311 had previously suggested deleting the second `laxata sunt/sint'.)

effigiem: infrequent in A., only here in conf. Take the sentence thus: `But how many and what great waves of temptation were to be seen threatening the other side of boyhood: that mother of mine already knew them, and wanted to risk in them the Earth from which I would afterwards be given shape, rather than the new Image itself.' The parallel at 13.12.13 just quoted and the `iam' are decisive in what has been a crux interpretum. But `unde' need not refer to `terram': it may perhaps to `eos' [sc. fluctus], making the `waters' both the floods of temptation and the water from which he would be baptized. Grammatically this solution (suggested to me by Prof. Henry Chadwick) is slightly superior to all others.

committere: Cf. en. Ps. 32. en. 1.16, `nec quisquis . . . salvus erit, si se suae fortitudini multum commiserit'; en. Ps. 36. s. 3.7, `hoc est semen tuum; . . . terrae committis, et tanto amplius conligis; Christo committis, et perdis?' And so forth, abundantly with the dative. On close examination of every occurrence of committo in en. Ps. and conf., the only senses are (1) with the acc. in the sense of `committing sins' and (2) with acc. + dat. in the sense of entrusting x to y. From OLD and TLL 3.1909, it is clear that it can also occur with acc. + in + acc., `entrusting x to y.' There seems to be no parallel for the use here, with acc. + per + acc., which is the difficulty that has exercised the critics.35 Knöll's emendation at least goes to the likeliest focus of the problem, but to read potius takes away the indirect object; and in the sense of `entrust/risk' committo always takes an explicit or implied indirect object, which is the function that in spite of its oddity per eos does indeed fulfill (Arts 24 counts 170x in conf. where per + acc. expresses instrument or means).

1.12.19

This paragraph makes one twofold thematic statement about A. and his God: that A. did not like to study (`non amabam litteras'), and that God guided A. through his studies to a good end (`et bene mihi fiebat abs te'). The rest of the paragraph is a meditation on those assertions in a way characteristic of conf.: other people appear in it, but as bit players in the main drama between A. and God. Where human actions seem to be determinative, A. seeks to show that they are not. A meditation of this nature is more attractive to us than when he preaches predestinate grace against the Pelagians; but the latter crusade is of a piece with this passage.

fiebat: the (virtual) passive for contrast with what follows: `nec faciebam', `nec . . . faciebant'). With `tu bene faciebas mihi', the shift from passive to active shifts attention to God's action away from A.'s experience of that action.

non enim discerem: `enim' introduces the minor premise; `autem' the major premise; the conclusion is what has already been stated, `bene mihi fiebat', and will be restated with the addition of `abs te' presently.

autem: autem C D G O Ver.: enim S Knöll Skut.
This is one of many places where Verheijen has altered the text he received from Skutella (and, in this case, Knöll) without reconsidering the punctuation.

de non: de non Maur. Pell. supported by two minor manuscripts (one offering the reading only in a correction): non de C D G O S Skut. Ver.
The text insists on being taken in the way the Maurists' correction implies. The sense of the paragraph is not (as non de would make it) that there were people doing good whom God disdained to use, but that there were people doing no good but God used them anyway to do good for A. A. could not have written non de facientibus to mean de non facientibus. The sequence non de is common enough (14x in conf.; see below) to facilitate the change from de non; the latter is rare,36 but does occur once, for a precisely similar antithetical effect to that which is required here: 10.39.64, `sed sibi placentes multum tibi displicent non tantum de non bonis quasi bonis, verum etiam de bonis tuis quasi suis.' (With the correction, `non bene facientibus' may perhaps be taken to include both A. and those who pressed him to his studies.) For non between preposition and its object, cf. also 3.8.16, `vel in non concessa'; 6.7.11, `quae in non magna aetate satis eminebat'. It is clear on the other hand that the sequence non de occurs elsewhere only where the non modifies some other element than the object of de. Occurrences in conf.: 3.6.10, 8.4.9, 10.23.33 (`quoniam qui non de te gaudere volunt'), 10.23.33, 10.31.46, 11.2.4, 12.7.7 (`fecisti enim caelum et terram non de te'), 12.17.25, 12.28.38, 13.23.33, 13.30.45, 13.33.48.

1.13.20

A.'s past remains unintelligible to him except as a history of self-will. His hostility to Greek is momentarily called to mind, then dropped (to return at 1.14.23) in favor of reflection on his course of study in Latin. The habits of misreading implanted here obstructed his approach to scripture for a long time.

graecas litteras: On A.'s Greek studies, the consensus (after Marrou 27-46 and 631-637, Courcelle, LLW 149-165, B. Altaner, Kleine Patristische Schriften [Berlin, 1967], 129-153 along with Altaner's numerous articles on A.'s specific debts to Greek patristic literature) is that A. had limited but usable knowledge throughout his career (sufficient, e.g., to check readings in the Greek scriptures: see esp. D. de Bruyne, MA 2.521-606), and that he enhanced that skill later in life (in the 410s) to expand his knowledge of Greek patristic literature. His own remarks are strongly marked by rhetorical self-depreciation, e.g., c. litt. Pet. 2.38.91, `et ego quidem graecae linguae perparum assecutus sum et prope nihil.' Greek texts never came to A. unmediated. (What was possible in Africa at this time is another story; Ferrandus' life of Fulgentius of Ruspe [b. c. 467] makes ambitious claims for his Greek studies under a Monnica-like influence: `Fulgentium religiosa mater moriente celeriter patre graecis litteris imbuendum primitus tradidit et quamdiu totum simul Homerum memoriter reddidisset, Menandri quoque multa percurreret, nihil de latinis permisit litteris edoceri' [PL 65.119]. But, as Courcelle, LLW 221-222, shows, his demonstrable competence is modest; perhaps the Ferrandus text is best taken as evidence of the survival of the prestige of the language.)

legere et scribere et numerare: The same triad at 1.15.24; foreshadowing the colloquial English `Three Rs' (in English they do note antedate a jocular toast offered in 1795 by the Lord Mayor of London, Sir William Curtis, distinguished in the DNB as a man the object of more ridicule than any other of his time).

vanitate vitae: = ambitio saeculi [1] < 1 Jn. 2.16 (see on 1.10.16). Successes in his schooling and teaching are regular examples of his weakness before this temptation.

Aeneae nescio cuius: This phrase and `cuiusdam Ciceronis' at 3.4.7 (more controversial: see notes there) contain an undeniable air of mild disdain (cf. Cic. de orat. 1.20.91., where Antonius is deprecating the learned tradition among rhetoricians: `cum repeteret usque a Corace nescio quo et Tisia', where the names were scarcely less familiar than Aeneas' here), but there is no pretense (even a merely rhetorical one) not to know the name; the disdain must not be overemphasized. (Such disdain needed not be absolute and his practice could vary: cf. 5.3.6, `cum dictis Manichaei', with 5.5.8, `Manichaeum nescio quem'.) Testard 1.14n3 wants this to hint at the fabulous quality of the Aeneas story; in view of the other figures treated in a similar way elsewhere, this is unlikely. Vergil's power to linger in memory is expressly recognized at civ. 1.3, `apud Vergilium, quem propterea parvuli legunt, ut videlicet poeta magnus omniumque praeclarissimus atque teneris ebibitus animis non facile oblivione possit aboleri.' And it was not only as a text that Aeneas came to A.: s. 242.5.5, `pauci nostis in libris, multi in theatris, quia Aeneas descendit ad inferos . . ..'

Why the literal citation? He says thereby not merely `for the dead Dido', but `for the dead Dido as incorporated in the text of the Aeneid'. It was not just a story or a figure of myth that appealed to him, but a text: the authorized version. He invokes scriptural texts the same way all the time. (Donatus thought highly of this passage--which is not from the narrative of Dido's fate, but the pathetic encounter of Aeneas with her shade in the underworld: interp. verg. ad 6.457, `dictio ista mira arte concepta est et pro personarum et pro causarum ratione composita.' He emphasizes Aeneas's acknowledgement of his own blame for Dido's death.) J. Bernhart, in a note ad loc. in his German translation, offers a further suggestion: `Extrema sequi im Vergil-Zitat wird hier unvermittelt in Sinne neuplatonischer Eschatologie vom moralischen Tod der Hingabe an die Materie verstanden.' This cannot be ruled out if A. knew any full or partial (on the underworld parts of Aeneid 6 only?) neoplatonizing Vergil commentary (see on 8.2.3).

sequens ipse extrema: G-M: `the point of connexion being purely verbal'. Better, given the verbal connection, the result is a transmutation of Vergil's text into something A. finds better and truer. The primae litterae thus demonstrate their usefulness apart from the misuses of the schools.

tali: tali C D G: talis OS Maur. Knöll Skut. Ver.
The want of a demonstrative pronoun (e.g., haec) with `litterae' has led editors to retain with the better manuscripts the improbable reading talis. Nothing in A., or in Latin, parallels the construction, difficult first for the awkward change of number, and second, for the odd equation dementia = litterae, the more so because the verb of the sentence is a verb of mental activity that dementia would qualify very well in the ablative. Latin dementia denotes activity of mind, which might perhaps with difficulty be extended to apply to sayings uttered in a state of dementia (though there is no parallel even for that, e.g., haec sententia dementia est). Even examples of dementia in the nominative with a copulative verb are rare, and then the only example in A. equates dementia to a verb of mental activity: civ. 1.3, `quae dementia est existimare his tutoribus Romam sapienter fuisse commissam'. Further, tali(s) denotes what has immediately gone before, the folly of the young A. sorry when he could not read what would give him sorrow. It is impossible to equate that dementia with `honestiores et uberiores litterae'.

Translate thus: `by madness such as that evinced by the student A., that literary study is thought more highly of than the study of the elements of reading and writing.'

doctrina: Common in A. in both secular and religious senses. Biblical: in Latin OT, mainly in Proverbs and Sirach; in NT infrequent in Gospels (and once only in the mouth of Jesus: Jn. 7.16, `mea doctrina non est mea, sed eius qui misit me'), but common in Paul. The word furnishes A. and those of his cultural background (cf. Marrou 554-558) with an instrument by which Christian teaching was gradually assimilated to the norms and techniques of the prevailing secular culture. At Mt. 16.12, the doctrina of the Pharisees and Sadducees is deprecated, and no one mistook Jesus for a schoolmaster or conventional rabbi. The difference between A. the bishop and A. the schoolmaster is not so pronounced (for the parallel development in the Greek east, see C. Schäublin, Untersuchungen zur Methode und Herkunft der Antiochenischen Exegese [Cologne/Bonn, 1974]).

at enim: `To be sure': presenting a possible objection to his view. His response, `sed non illa magis honorem secreti . . . significant', makes explicit the implication of the objection. He has found these studies disreputable; he imagines the objection, `but the higher studies are carried on in the dignified privacy provided by the velum'; and responds, `the velum is there not to provide privacy but to conceal error.' This expression is classical (OLD s.v. at 4) and is the exclusive use of the collocation in A. The phrase does not occur elsewhere in conf., once only in en. Ps. (31. en. 2.16), but is common in civ. (13x), particularly the earlier books of rhetorical parry and thrust. In every case, at enim introduces a single sentence or clause containing a possible objection to A.'s position, and is followed immediately by A.'s rejoinder, often marked by an adversative conjunction: e.g., civ. 1.10, `at enim quidam boni etiam christiani tormentis excruciati sunt, ut bona sua hostibus proderent. illi vero nec prodere nec perdere potuerunt bonum quo ipsi boni erant.'

ipsius umbrae Creusae: Aen. 2.772, `infelix simulacrum atque ipsius umbra Creusae'. As at 1.13.21, the ipsissima verba emphasize that the folly is not merely in the story, but in the received textual version. The episodes evoked by these echoes are among the most pathetic in Vergil: the irrevocable loss by Aeneas of the two women who loved him. (A. also abandons two women in conf.: Monnica temporarily at 5.8.15 [with strong echoes of Dido--see notes there], his concubine permanently at 6.15.25 [and she, like Creusa, leaves A. with a son].)

1.14.23

There is no scripture in this paragraph and little in the one before. The unscriptural text is at center stage, infecting the narrative. The implicit assertion, exemplified by this paragraph, is that divine power goes even where the scriptural word is missing.

Homerus: Wherever A. has specific information about Homer's text, it proves on examination to have come to him from the scholiastic tradition on Vergil (e.g., at civ. 3.2, cf. Serv. on Aen. 5.810). None of the few and scattered references to Homer elsewhere in A. gives any sign of direct knowledge or of a more than conventional respect. Outside of civ. and conf., H. is named only at haer. 7, on the Carpocratians, one of whom, one Marcellina, `colebat imagines Iesu et Pauli et Homeri et Pythagorae adorando incensumque ponendo'.

peritus: peritia for A. is always a secular or worldly skill (particularly apt therefore to artes such as medicine: cf. 4.3.5), and may even apply to non-Christian religious expertise, but he seems never to speak of it as an excellence associated with the Christian religion. Expertise is often misdirected; hence, though peritus may be used in a neutral and even laudatory way (e.g., civ. 18.43, `temporibus nostris presbyter Hieronymus, homo doctissimus et omnium trium linguarum peritus'), it often carries a slight overtone of criticism (e.g., en. Ps. 101. s. 1.1, `etiamsi periti senes, quid illorum peritia ad verbum dei? quid illorum peritia ad sapientiam dei?').

1.15.24

The memoirs of infancy and boyhood are at an end; A. returns to the confessional mode, to comment rather than remember, to judge rather than to describe. How artificial is the high-minded austerity that values in school studies nothing but a kind of education that could have been gotten less damagingly elsewhere? A similar doubt intrudes for us at civ. 1.9, when he suggests that the sufferings of the just arise from no active fault but from their failure to reproach the wickedness of others. His weakest arguments seem to have been excogitated but not felt.

in eis vanis: G-M connect with `delectationum' by hyperbaton; unlikely, because that reading would make the demonstrative `eis' superfluous. The more obvious reading, `the sins of my delights', should be preferred.

ambularent: Earlier editors, seeing here a connection with `dimisisti' in the last sentence, hark back to the parable of the paralytic (cf. Mk. 2.5-10, Lk. 5.23): Mt. 9.5, `quid enim est facilius, dicere: dimittuntur peccata tua, aut dicere: surge et ambula.' If there is a hint of that, it would suggest again the second person of the trinity.

ex eodem pulvere: Not the dust of which Adam is created in Genesis, but the dust of the competitive arena--the other magistri will be aroused to contentious denial by such a statement. The metaphor is implicit: it was commonplace (e.g., Hor. carm. 1.1.3 and 1.8.4) to speak of the pulvis of the real arenas.

imitatus: Mimesis is a recognized path to behavior acquisition (22x in conf.), but how models are treated determines whether the behavior is good or bad. It is wrong to imitate God in the wrong way (2.6.13, `nam et superbia celsitudinem imitatur'; 2.6.14, `perverse te imitantur omnes'), but very right to imitate Christ or even those who imitate him (13.21.31, `imitando imitatores Christi tui'), and careful presentation of models can inspire praiseworthy zeal (8.5.10, `exarsi ad imitandum [Victorinum]').

1.16.26

o: The interjection occurs frequently, preponderantly in addresses to the nominal second person audience of the text--God, but with a wide and curious miscellany of other persons and things as well, particularly in the treatment of the pear-theft (2.6.12ff). Here A. presents himself as uncomfortable with the personification implied, and in a few more lines turns emphatically to formal address directed again to God.

filii: filii C2 G O Maur. Pell.: fili C1 D S Knöll Skut. Ver.
The shorter form, if indeed it represents a lingering trace of A.'s practice, is a nicety too poorly attested to be insisted upon; fili for A. is a regular form of the vocative singular (9.10.26, 13.12.13 [2x]). It is printed once by Skutella and Verheijen for the vocative plural (4.12.19) inconsistently, since they also print the exact same citation of Ps. 4.3 at 9.4.9 with filii; the text at 4.12.19 is attested as here by C1 DS for fili and C2 GO for filii; the other ninth-century manuscripts are similarly consistent in their treatment of the two passages with one minor exception. But filii hominum occurs elsewhere and is uniformly attested in the MSS in the longer form and so printed at 1.18.29 and 12.8.8. Where the nominative plural is required elsewhere, filii is unanimously attested: 8.4.9, 13.14.15 (4x).

1.17.27

C. Bennett, REAug 34(1988), 48: `The Bible should have replaced Vergil (1.17.27). This position is not surprising; what is, is that there was also a safe way to read Vergil--a way the Confessions itself illustrates.'

sine me . . . dicere: Prayer for the gift of speech marked the beginning of the main exposition of Bk. 1 (1.6.7, `sine me loqui apud misericordiam tuam'), now recurs to introduce the concluding section.

in quibus: The asyndeton of the relative clause is a little harsh, because the construction is not quite parallel: `Let me say something even of my ingenium, your gift, [and let me say] by what acts of madness it was squandered.'

deliramentis: of specific instances (thoughts, words, or deeds) of a disordered intellect, where dementia (see on 1.13.21) is used of a pattern of such activity indicating, and virtually identified with, an underlying disorder.

A.'s meditation on the fall of Rome in s. 81 (taking a rather harder anti-Roman line than in civ.) ends with the recollection of Juno's speech to Aeolus, to argue that the Romans themselves were, as Trojans, once fugitives from a sacked city, and that a mighty goddess even then hounded them and opposed the founding of their new city: s. 81.9, `inducitur a poeta ipsorum Iuno irascens Aeneae et Troianis fugientibus, et dicit,

vera vita: Jn. 14.6 etc. (see on 1.4.4); the last similar expression, at 1.13.20 (`deus, vita mea'), also occurred in a meditation on the way he read the Aeneid.

quod: quod C D G O Maur. Vega Ver. Pell.: quid S Knöll Skut.

conlectoribus: Apparently first here in the surviving literature (cf. only Evod. ad Aug. in A. ep. 158.10, `condiscipulus et conlector') and rare (next attestations two hundred years later in Greg. Mag. and Ildef. Tolet.). The same word in the more obvious cognate sense `gatherer' also appears, approximately as rare and as late: cf. TLL s.v.

palmitem: Jn. 15.4, `sicut palmes non potest ferre fructum a semetipso, nisi manserit in vite; sic nec vos, nisi in me manseritis. ego sum vitis, vos palmites.' The scriptural language usually evokes from A. discussions (e.g., Io. ev. tr. 80-81) of pruning fruitless branches; here the modification is slight but optimistic. The passage has proved difficult for translators to render with much literal fidelity. Pine-Coffin rarely strives for literal fidelity, and so perhaps expresses the metaphor most effectively here: `I might have used them [wits and tongue] O Lord, to praise you in the words of your Scriptures, which could have been a prop to support my heart, as if it were a young vine, so that it would not have produced the crop of worthless fruit, fit only for the birds to peck at.'

praeda volatilibus: volatilia is the regular word in conf. for birds (two exceptions only, the volucrum of Rom. 1.23 at 5.3.5 and 7.9.15).

non . . . uno modo: The conventional acceptation of `paganism' leaves no room for the young A., brought up in a Christian milieu, always flirting with the church (Brown 41: `Paganism meant nothing to Augustine'); but his view was that anything but full church membership was rank heathenism, and he stretches to assimilate his behavior to his own preconception. Cf. his use of Jer. 2.27 at 2.3.6.

As in CL, vultus is properly `expression' (cf. 1.8.13, `quae fiunt vultu et nutu oculorum ceterorumque membrorum actu') and facies is properly `face' (i.e., the front of the head--cf. 2.3.6, `qui ponunt tergum ad te et non faciem'); but already in CL the two were loosely interchangeable in many contexts, and that holds true even more for A., who is under the influence of scriptural texts where the Latin words are inconsistently used to translate Greek translations of the Hebrew; here, at Ps. 26.8, the Greek is pro/swpon; at Ps. 104.4, `quaerite faciem eius semper,' the Greek is still pro/swpon. Whether A. noticed that inconsistency or not, the substantive context is so similar that his exegesis is relevant here. Similar longing for the face of God (in a work that transpires in conspectu dei--see on 1.16.26) is expressed (with various scriptural warrants noted ad loc.) frequently--facies is the most common word: 1.5.5, 4.10.15, 8.10.22, 9.4.10, 10.5.7, 10.41.66, 12.15.21, 12.17.24, 13.8.9, 13.14.15, 13.15.18, 13.21.30.

The best treatment is G. N. Knauer, Hermes 85(1957), 216-248; see also L. Ferrari, RA 12(1977), 105-118 (who offers the interesting suggestion that A.'s own brother Navigius [who appears at 9.11.27] bears some resemblances to the elder brother of the parable). There is a suggestive note by A.-M. La Bonnardière in Annuaire de l'école pratique des Hautes études, Ve section, Sc. Relig. 73 (1965-1966), 154-155. For a provocative reading that may not be far wrong, bear in mind Rilke, Malte Laurids Brigge: `Man wird mich schwer davon überzeugen, dass die Geschichte des verlorenen Sohnes nicht die Legende dessen ist, der nicht geliebt werden wollte.'40 But note the essential difference. The acquisition of the Bible by cultured Greeks and Latins imported a huge collection of narratives against which to measure their own experience. These stories, for all their subtleties of construction, were at bottom unsubtle, black-and-white without shades of gray, cast in the desert sunlight of divine judgment. The breathing room for a re-reading of the story that Rilke finds was not there for A. and is indeed utterly alien to a scriptural reading of the story.

The `literal sense' of the parable is the story told by Jesus about a man and his two sons, without special explanation. The two sons can then represent those who have been faithful and those who stray--in some contexts, this can imply the contrast between Jew and Gentile, but A. also takes the story back to the garden and asserts that the departure from home is equated with original sin (as at en. Ps. 24.5, `neque enim dimissus a te de paradiso et in longinquam regionem peregrinatus, per meipsum redire possum, nisi occurras erranti'). By the flexibility of that allegorical reading, the story then becomes the story of A. himself, a man whose relationship with his own father was difficult and strained, apparently unmarked by any final reconciliation. When A. is baptized (which on the theological level represents a return of the prodigal to the paternal God), he is at the same time being reconciled with Patricius--or at least with Patricius' own final disposition to accept baptism. Hence the possibility of prayer invoked for both Monnica and Patricius at 9.13.37.

1.18.29

Two patterns of order are superimposed on each other here, with their similarities drawn out to contrast the values they represent. Order and law exist in human language as it is used here, but it is all shown to be a fraud, and a killing one at that, by the hidden order and law of God that works in and through even the deeds of his most perverse opponents.

But (1) it is hard to imagine a scribe finding an unexceptionable text (homines) and, having been paying attention closely to what they were copying, conjecturally emending to insert a grammatical fault--likelier that hominibus was there, and that it was regularized to homines by a solicitous but inattentive scribe; and (2) he has given an example of barbarism in this paragraph already (`sine adspiratione primae syllabae hominem dixerit') and is here complementing it with an example of solecism, still using the word homo as his touchstone, to give moral weight to his comparison above (`quam si contra tua praecepta hominem oderit, cum sit homo').

paedagogum: Presumably the family servant who accompanied the young boy to school.

amore ludendi, studio spectandi nugatoria et imitandi ludicra inquietudine: There are three ways to take the last three words. (1) `ludicra inquietudine' as ablative, parallel to `amore' and `studio' and governing the genitive gerund `imitandi' (the reading of the BA translation); (2) `inquietudine' as ablative, parallel to `amore' and `studio' and governing the genitive gerund `imitandi', with `ludicra' as neuter plural object of `imitandi' (the reading of Arts 118); (3--assumed for the punctuation here) `imitandi' as genitive governed by `studio' (and parallel with `spectandi') and `ludicra inquietudine' as ablative of the manner in which this gawping and aping takes place.

1.20.31

The first book closes with a tentative closure of the whole work: `had I died in childhood, then that childhood would have been matter enough for confession such as this.' The paragraph begins and ends with thanks to God. Just as Bk. 13 ends with anticipation of the afterlife, so see here `ero ipse tecum'.

dulcedo [3] . . . honor [1] . . . fiducia [2]: The authentic goals of those three ambitions should be the sweetness that comes from God, the honor (in a client relationship: God honors me, and so I honor him--hence an expression of humility), and the faithfulness (active sense mutually: from A., the opposite of curiositas).

fiducia: The usage (of the person in whom one reposes confidence) is not unparallelled: see L. G. Engels, Graecitas et Latinitas Christianorum primaeva, Supplementa III (Nijmegen, 1970), 73-74 (not biblical as far as A. knew, but Jerome used it twice in his version of the Psalter from the Hebrew, at Ps. 21.10 and 70.5 [in both cases rendering Gk. e)lpi/s].

2 Most recently, e.g., Pizzolato, Lectio I-II, 9, citing a Greek grammarian's precept to quote authority at the outset of a work; more pertinently, attempts to see Manichean or pagan precedents in hymns and prayers of praise: a collection of such textual analogues is M. Zepf, Augustins Confessiones (Tübingen, 1926), 63-96.

3 A.'s own practice varies: some works have formal separate prefaces, some dedicatory epistles, some prefaces incorporating a dedication, and some simply begin baldly (e.g., Gn. litt.): no other work of his begins with direct address to God.

4 Eliot, `East Coker': `So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing'; Durrell, Justine: `Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?'

5 For further and more ambitious reflections in this vein, see J.-J. Goux, Tel Quel 21(1965), 67-75, e.g. at 68: `Tendu vers l'Auditeur muet, Augustin est pris par le désir de se dire tout entier'; cf. also F. E. Consolino, Materiali e discussioni per l'analisi dei testi classici 6(1982), 119-146 (esp. on the way sol. and util. cred. approach in places what A. does in conf.); and R. Herzog, in K. Stierle and R. Warning, eds., Das Gespräch (Munich, 1984), 213-250; in a more traditional vein, see R. Guardini, Anfang (Munich, 3rd ed., 1953). W. Theiler's display of Hermetic parallels (Die Vorbereitung des Neuplatonismus [Berlin, 1930], 128-131) is less trenchant; see G. Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes (Cambridge, 1986), placing the Hermetic texts in a context broad enough to show how their ideas and terms entered a wider realm of discourse on which A. and others could draw.

6 The words for `confession' are lacking in the opening paragraphs; fateor not until 1.5.6, confiteor not until 1.6.9. T. Deman, La Vie Spirituelle 39(1957), 261, noted this to ask whether the notion confessio was an original part of the work's conception, suggesting that it only really becomes prominent in Book 10. The reading of the first page proposed here demonstrates that if the exact word was not in mind, the thing for which it stood in A.'s mind is amply present.

The view taken here was also that expressed, forcefully, by Wittgenstein (quoted by M. O'C. Darcy, in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections ed. R. Rhees [Totowa, N.J., 1981], 105). The sentence `et vae . . . muti sunt' was used as a dedicatory inscription in a copy of his own Stunden-Buch by Rilke in 1912/13, at a time when he had been translating this part of Book 1 (J. Ferreiro, Rilke y San Agustin [Madrid, 1966], 7).

Either the authenticity or the commonly accepted date (391) or the integrity from later contamination of s. 351.2.2 (which says that the faith of the sponsors suffices `ad consecrationem remissionemque originalis peccati' in infant baptism) must be contested; the authenticity has drawn various opinions (see Verbraken).

nat. b. is probably contemporary with conf. (retr. 2.9 places it after c. Fel.of 404, but that work is out of order; see Mutzenbecher in CCSL 57.xviii-xix). Neither the retr. notice nor the work itself give any hint of circumstances, addressee, etc. Its Tendenz is anti-Manichean (it quotes their ep. fund. and thesaurus [including some strikingly `explicit' (ut nostrates aiunt) texts that discreet translators pass over]), and its emphasis on the ontology of modus/species/ordo makes explicit something often implicit in c. ep. fund. The last paragraph (nat. b. 48) is an oratio Augustini, heavily scriptural, that would not be out of place in conf. Many of the scriptural proof-texts occur frequently in conf., and it would not be surprising if nat. b. were at least in part a sketch of ideas (most of the work, chs. 1-39, is repetitive, as if A. were going over ideas and getting them straight) to be used elsewhere.

For a similar point of dispute, see on 1 Jn. 2.16 discussed at 1.10.16 and 10.30.41 below; see on 10.30.41 for the relevance of Cic. off. 1.4.14 (quoted in next paragraph here), where modus, pulchritudo, and ordo appear in a passage alongside foreshadowings of the triad of temptations presented by 1 Jn. 2.16.

Throughout this commentary, the figures [1], [2], [3] mark words or phrases that form part of trinitarian triads. Sometimes they represent ideas that are predicated directly of the three persons of the trinity, and sometimes they represent parts of the world of creature (esp. of human nature) that reflect (or distort) the trinitarian structure of the creating God. The point in marking these triads is not so much theological or philosophical as rhetorical: to show how phraseology of this sort runs through A.'s texts. For the deeper issues, see du Roy passim.

The italicized words are missing in all known MSS of vera rel., but appear in all modern editions beginning with Amerbach (1506) and are defended by the most recent editor (K.-D. Daur, Sac. Erud. 12[1961], 338); only Green in CSEL 77 rejects them; as du Roy 384 argues, they are necessary, logical, and probable, not least because Amerbach did not indulge in conjecture, so he must have had a manuscript containing them.

The fifth age was appropriate for involvement in the business of the secular world (Gn. c. man. 1.25.43, `incipiat quinto die in actionibus turbulentissimi saeculi, tamquam in aquis maris operari'), business whose burden A. acutely felt in the late 390s.

This is the next stage anticipated from the tranquility of Thagaste; it is this transformation that he thought he had lost and for which he shed tears at his ordination in Hippo shortly after writing vera rel.

Without examining all 3114 instances of ceterus, -a, -um in A., note that unambiguously singular forms of the word are extremely rare: ceterus appears nowhere, ceteram only 6x, and of the 74x appearances of cetero, at least 65 are in the adverbial phrase de cetero. By contrast, the unambiguously plural forms are common (e.g., ceteris 786x, ceterorum 85x). The lexica confirm the infrequency of the singular as adjective.

D. De Bruyne, MA 2.553, uses this passage to argue that A. deliberately revised/corrected against the LXX Greek a Psalter close to the Veronensis (whose reading the citation here follows for its parallel to the text). A. in en. Ps. 24.17 reads educ (following LXX e)ca/gage) for libera. Here the Veronensis text seems to persist in memory.

Any such collocation is extremely rare in A. and when found has a different sense, e.g., c. litt. Pet. 2.78.174, `quae vestri cotidie committunt per scelera furiosorum', where per is clearly `by means of'; so too the only other example, s. 162.2.

And perhaps closer to A. than usually thought. If A. Cameron (in Christianisme et formes littéraires de l'antiquité tardive en occident [Entretiens Hardt, 23: Geneva, 1976], 7n2) is correct in seeing an allusion to A.M. in Amb. fuga saec. 3.16 (of approx. 387), then some earlier version of the work may have been in circulation in Christian circles by the time A. was in Milan.

The story itself seems to invite reflection on the prodigality of the father as much as of the son, but this reading seems alien to the interpretation of A. and his time (or is at least ruled out if the suspicion arises: cf. Amb. in Luc. 7.213, `vides quod divinum patrimonium petentibus datur, nec putes culpam patris quod adulescentiori dedit').

The prodigal was long familiar to Rilke's pen, from his Geschichten vom lieben Gott to his `Der Auszug des verlorenen Sohnes' of 1906 (in Neue Gedichte), his translation of Gide's treatment of the story, and elsewhere. Malte was published in 1910. A year later, Rilke began translating conf. in Paris, breaking off to go up to Duino for the winter of 1911-12, where he began the Duineser Elegien. The translation made little progress, and the papers were among those left in Paris during the war. He never returned to the task, but there are surviving fragments that may eventually be published. See J. Ferreiro, Rilke y San Agustin (Madrid, 1966).